The message in Calderon's war on drugs

Some view his use of military as a way to quickly gain support, show security a priority

MARION LLOYD, Houston Chronicle Foreign Service

Published 6:30 am, Sunday, January 7, 2007

MEXICO CITY — Six years ago, Mexico's first democratically elected president made a promise he couldn't keep: To take the military out of the war on drugs.

Now his successor, President Felipe Calderon, has gone even further in embracing the army as the enforcer of last resort.

The reason: With many local and state police forces either corrupted or outgunned, the military is increasingly seen as the only institution capable of leading the fight against the narco-traffickers.

Since taking office on Dec. 1, Calderon has deployed more than 9,000 troops and hundreds of federal police to battle the drug gangs, first in central Michoacan state and then in Tijuana, across the border from San Diego. On Thursday, Tijuana's entire 2,100-member police force walked off the job after soldiers seized their weapons to check for links to homicides.

Government officials say they plan to expand the military strategy to other states. The manpower for such a campaign is, on paper at least, impressive. Mexico's army has about 170,000 troops, analysts say, and about 30,000 are deployed on full-time drug-patrol duty around the country.

The offensive is the latest — and most ambitious — attempt to curb drug violence that claimed a record 2,000 lives last year, including about 20 beheadings.

"This is not an easy task, nor will it be fast," Calderon said while visiting with troops Wednesday at a base in the Michoacan town of Apatzingan. "It will take a long time, imply using enormous resources and even, unfortunately, the loss of human lives."

But, he added, "if we continue working as we have been until now, our cities and our country will not remain in the hands of criminals."

A 'smart move'

Calderon has an additional motive for leaning on the military. His razor-thin victory in last summer's elections, which his opponents claim were rigged, gave him the weakest mandate of any modern Mexican president.

Many analysts see his swift and massive campaign against the traffickers as a way to gain legitimacy.

"It's a smart move," said Peter Ward, a Mexico expert at the University of Texas at Austin. "It was obviously very important for Calderon to nail his colors to the mast really early on in his administration and show that he was going to be serious about improving security."

Indeed, in his first public appearance as president, Calderon — flanked by rows of military officers — swore in his security Cabinet in a surprise midnight ceremony. And while breakfasting with troops Wednesday, he posed for photographers wearing an olive army cap and jacket.

The message seemed to convey a nation at war.

And in a sense, it is.

Ever since former President Ernesto Zedillo first deployed the army to combat the traffickers in the mid-1990s, Mexico has been steadily increasing the military's role in the drug fight.

Vicente Fox, Calderon's predecessor, campaigned on a promise to reverse that trend because he said it was unbefitting of a democratic nation. But once in office, Fox discovered he couldn't rely on corrupt police forces, and he turned to the military, culminating with the deployment in 2005 of hundreds of troops to drug-plagued cities on the U.S. border.

"Those who criticize the use of the army haven't come up with an alternative," said Jorge Chabat, a security analyst in Mexico City. "True, the army shouldn't be used for this, but what can we do?"

It's a dilemma Mexican officials have been grappling with for decades. The army has been used for drug eradication since the 1940s. But military officials long resisted playing an active role in the drug war for fear that it would expose troops to corruption.

Evolution of the drug war

By the mid-1990s, the amount of marijuana and cocaine smuggled across the U.S. border was skyrocketing. And the Mexican government was under increasing pressure from Washington to use the military to stop it.

The darkest fears of Mexican officials came true when the country's then-drug czar, Gen. Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, was arrested in 1997 on charges of conspiring with the Juarez drug cartel. It was a major national embarrassment. But in general, analysts say, the level of corruption within the military pales in comparison with that of the country's police.

At the same time, they warn that the more the troops come into contact with the traffickers, the greater the risk that they'll be bought off.

"This is a temporary solution," said Bruce Bagley, a Mexican security expert at the University of Miami. "The military is not up to snuff. It's already corrupt and easily corruptible."

Calderon "better be careful about placing all his eggs in that basket," he warned.

He argued that unless Calderon accompanies his military strategy with major reforms to the country's police, judicial and prison systems, he will make little headway against the traffickers.

The president apparently agrees. He has proposed unifying the two federal police forces; creating a national criminal database; expanding domestic drug abuse programs and seizing suspected traffickers' bank accounts.

Some critics say they have heard the proposals before.

A 'short-term' solution

So far, Calderon "is privileging the short-term show of force over a long-term strategy to really clean up the police," said
Laurie Freeman
, a Mexico analyst with the
Washington Office on Latin America
, a human rights group. She noted that previous military campaigns targeting drug hotspots simply sent the traffickers fleeing to other states.

"The problem of drug-trafficking is something that Mexico really can't solve militarily, whether there are 5,000 troops or 50,000," she said.